(I wrote this several years ago, on a night, in the 12th grade, when I was feeling the other face of myself. Memories, writing, fears, masks. Isn't writing the greatest mask that writers have for their inner world, and, in the same time, the greatest mirror to their souls? If we simply keep our eyes open to details, to connections, to words. I remember it from time to time, when another part of my Ego takes control and let the other one take a nap. :) )
Why is it that the most important changes in our lives happen when we least expect them? My life had settled into a comfortable, satisfying routine when suddenly I met her. Again.
I scarcely remember how things happened. I was driving to my best-friend when she suddenly jumped in front of my car. I only knew that I stopped on time, having in front of me the being who fascinated my entire world in my past. Her dark eyes, in that cloudy and rainy day, unlocked all my memories that were locked somewhere, deep, into my soul. They all escaped in reality, with the park in which we walked so many times, with her sweet voice and the smell of her skin …
She looked scared at me and before I awoke myself from my own memories, she ran away, disappearing among cars. I jumped from my car, running and calling her. “Lizzy, stay! Lizzy! It’s just me, Robert …” Only now, when I write all these, I remember that rush hour, and how close I were to be hit by one of those cars. But in those moments, I was again on my street, running after her, unable to reach her.”Hurry up, old man! This is all that you can do?!” Her sweet, innocent laugh … and now, she was again running in front of me. Fortunately, she tripped by a rock and fall. “Lizzy, it’s all right… It’s just me, Rob!” She had her eyes full of tears and her hands were trembling. “No, I don’t…oh, yes! Rob… what… you have to help me, please! Help me!” She got up, letting me stare at her, unable, again, to understand her. “Where are you staying?”
It’s useless to describe what happened after I told her my address, how she refused to return to the car, how we walked for an hour, how she answered at my questions with “yes”, “no”, “don’ now”. Happiness. This is what I was feeling then. Happiness that I met my past, that my muse was again with me. But it all gone away in the moment when we entered my flat.
She took a cigarette from her pocket and she started to look at my things. She was so nervous and her hands were trembling. She neglected my paintbrushes, all my pictures and drawings, and moving to here and there, said: “Don’t you have something to drink?” “Well… I have coffee; Tom always drinks coffee when he comes here…”
For the first time she started to laugh as she was doing long time ago and replied: “You kidding, aren’t you? Or you’re too different from the world I came ...”
She put her cigarette in one of my palette and without letting me say anything, she said: “Look, I need money, a lot of money, and you have to help me.” “Liz’, I would love to help you, but, you see all these paintings? I invested all my money in the exposition from next week. I’m sorry.” I paused for a moment, looking at her; she wasn’t listening, but she was becoming more and more agitated. Once, I knew her; now … who she was? The girl from my past, the woman from now, me, daring to ask her: “Do you still like my pictures Lizzy?”
She didn’t answer; after she looked around the chamber and from time to time to the window, taking another cigarette, then letting it fall on the floor, she started to take my books, my pictures, dropping them, one by one. Sounds … I would never forget those sounds, her steps on my pictures, paintings, books, her steps on my soul. “Do you really have in this lodge only books and awkward drawings?! Have you done them?”
Clouds of smoke. I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Was it all a mere nightmare? And when did I start to say to her all my thoughts…?
“It’s funny, you know … 15 years ago I was on the verge of hitting a little girl with my bicycled. She started crying and from that moment, we were inseparable. I remember how we fight sometimes, the perfume of your long, dark hair, the little chamber where we shared our dreams, were I was making your portrait and you were talking, and talking, and talking… And I just listened … you wanted to be a famous journalist and I wanted to be a painter. And that last night, that last day, in which the heavy rain seemed to share my feelings. ‘Go, Liz! Run, and be you! Go!” Your last look, your last kiss, the plane that was flying with you, taking with it the only person that I felt close, my confident, supporter, the person who encouraged me, the being who I loved most in my life …Do you REMEMBER?”
She stopped for a moment, raising her eyes upon me. Big, marvelous, now cold eyes. She started to walk to me, saying in the same time with a sure voice, that I would never forget: “And now? What do you see? Let me answer for you. That little girl is not so little any more, that wonderful hair is cut down and all those dreams, that you sustained we have, had passed away. “Lizzy…” “Hush…” interrupted me, putting one of her fingers upon my mouth. “Of course, she hated all these smoke and everything I demand you today. If I remember them? Oh, how I remember! And do you know what I still remember?”
Silence, as if time has stopped. Her smell, her skin, her lips so close of mine, her voice, her coldness, her words. I closed my eyes, waiting for her voice.
“That you were the one who helped me with that fly, which had seemed to change my entire life. I obtain from you everything I desired and then … went I was. But you were like me and I really can’t understand… how could you have had the strength to believe in you till the end, how could you managed to make your dream come true? Had I told you in that airport not to give up, not to forget me? Maybe I was wrong...”
I felt her cheek next to mine, I felt her lips on my lips, and then that whisper so close to my soul, which destroyed my whole world: “All your memories are false…”
The door had been slammed, the telephone had rung so many times; the voice of my friend who was wondering what’s wrong with me. It has been months since I refused to go out into the world. For what to live? But I was working on a last portrait. The portrait of my own memories. Under a heavy sky, some clouds are flying up and down, the pieces of memories are under some dark eyes, a glance that seems to look somewhere on the ground, but whose looking at little dove… me without myself… if our own memories are false, then what is true in life?
The exposition was a success, but I don’t care anymore. After all, for what all these, when the power I thought I had to achieve success wasn’t there not only a single time in my life. In who can I trust when she disappointed me, when she was never there ?…
And still … what is real, what is false? This morning, I discovered that she took not only the jewel of Tom’s wife, but also her own portrait made some time ago by myself, in that little chamber of memories …
(February, 2007)
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